


every word i'm screaming is another going unreceived

by heartbreakordeath



Series: wwcomms, soundtracked by hdyfn? [1]
Category: Bastille (Band)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, WWCOMMS | Wild World Communications (Bastille), actually no violence in this? i ignored it for the sake of plot, all of my christmas fics and all of your christmas fics we post them one by one, all that good wwcomms shit plus some shit i made up for funsies, also featuring some special guest stars that i didn't tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27803554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbreakordeath/pseuds/heartbreakordeath
Summary: Don’t you worry about your bad dreams‘Cause i’m not in themDon't you worry about what change bringsCause you can't stop it~joywave, bad dreams//this is the first of my december gift fics! super excited to be starting with my first ever WWCOMMS AU for the one and onlyallonmemorex, who hasanamazingWWCOMMS fic of their ownthat introduced me to this AU.
Relationships: Kyle Simmons/Dan Smith
Series: wwcomms, soundtracked by hdyfn? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2196414
Comments: 12
Kudos: 17
Collections: Gift Fic Month!





	every word i'm screaming is another going unreceived

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mirandabeach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirandabeach/gifts).



> ej said they wished more wwcomms fics existed, so i said 'hey, how hard could it be?' and proceeded to word-vomit this entire thing in 24 hours, sooo i hope it's not entirely shit?? i really hope i did the AU justice, i already wanna write 6 sequels :)

He’s running down a dark street, weaving around piles of rubble and debris, but they’re gaining on him. Dan’s ahead of him, looking back every once in a while to make sure Kyle’s still hot on his heels. Kyle’s lungs are burning, his chest aching with every step towards freedom he takes, and he curses his past self for the days he skipped training in favor of an extra few hours of sleep.

Dan turns around again, and Kyle sees his eyes widen at the same time as he feels the heat from the spotlight wash over him. It’s blinding in a split-second, searing into his vision, and he curses again, squinting against the light and trying to keep his eyes focused on the road, on Dan, on-

“ _Kyle_!” Dan yells, slipping on a pile of loose gravel as he skids to a half-stop, stumbling backwards away from the sleek helicopter. He fights against himself for a moment, needing to _move_ , to _escape_ , to do _anything_ \- until a dark-cloaked figure streaks into view and grabs him by the shoulder, pulling them both back into the alleyway.

“It’s not worth it,” Charlie’s saying, but there’s the beginnings of tears forming in his eyes as he drags Dan away from the road. “You know what they would have done to you.”

Dan can’t even speak, just follows wordlessly along in shock as his feet automatically lead him back towards the base. _It doesn’t matter what they do to me_ , he wants to say. _I’d let them take me over Kyle any day of the fucking week_.

In one, clarifying moment, he thinks: _it should have been me._

_I’d rather forget everything I’ve ever known than remember losing him._

But it’s too late for those kinds of thoughts now.

* * *

“Has he come up anywhere yet?” 

Dan’s pacing the length of the narrow room, as he has been every day since his entire world imploded. “They usually start... _showing them off_ by now, don’t they?”

“It’s only been a week,” Woody reminds him (again) from his chair. “We’ve been keeping an eye out, of course, but it could take up to the end of the month for them to…finish him completely.”

Nobody in the room needs a refresher on what he means by that. 

It only took two weeks for WWCOMMS to Tune in the last two rebels it had stolen away. They’d gotten one of them back recently, but that didn’t mean much anymore. At this point, the majority of people treated them as casualties unless they showed any hint of Tuning out. 

The only thing that had ever given Dan some peace was the certainty that if _anybody_ could Tune themselves out of whatever was put into their fucking Kool-aid at WWCOMMS, it was his team. 

It’s easy to remember when he looks at Will, whose eyes are mostly back to normal now after nearly six months of freedom. It’s harder to remember when his eyes land on the empty chair next to him, when he feels an unfamiliar chill against his side where Kyle’s warmth would normally be.

“We’ll find him,” Will says, as if reading Dan’s thoughts from across the table. “We always do.”

What he doesn’t say, though, is what they’re all thinking. They _will_ find Kyle, bring him home- and risk losing others to the void in the process...just to save a life that might have been sucked out of him _long_ before the rebels stole him back.

* * *

Dan makes it another week and a half before he runs out of busywork to do. His laundry has been done, his shared room cleaner than any of his friends have ever seen (they start getting concerned the instant they can see more than a foot of the floor from the doorway), and then he shatters.

Ralph finds him sitting cross-legged on the top bunk- Kyle’s bed, assigned years ago with the excuse that he was the taller of the two- staring blankly at the opposite wall. Ralph takes one look at the previously-tidy bed sheets, sees that Dan’s own bed lies untouched, raises his eyebrows, and decides not to comment on it.

Dan doesn’t acknowledge him until Ralph’s standing right in front of him, crossing his arms over the bed frame and leaning against it. If he didn’t know any better, Ralph would think _Dan_ was the one recovering from the Tuning.

But he knows his friend better than anyone here, and he recognizes that look. Barely a day goes by without one of the base’s inhabitants sinking into these sorts of spirals. Ralph’s been there himself, more times than he’d like to think about.

“D’you remember what you said to me?” Ralph starts, shifting from one foot to the other. Dan sniffs, shakes his head, keeps his eyes trained on the bare wall. “To _all_ of us, that day we lost Soph?”

“Don’t talk about Soph,” Dan snaps, his entire body stiffening. “Ever.”

Ralph sighs, pressing forward anyways. “Our motto, that year. On all the posters. Tom recorded it, broadcasted it that day we finally breached the WW radio systems. It changed _everything_ about this fight, Dan.”

Dan squeezes his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his hands into them.

“‘We can never go back’,” he recites hoarsely, tone void of emotion.

“‘We can only do our best to recreate’,” Ralph finishes after a beat of silence. “And you were right. That’s all we can do. All we’ve _been_ doing. That’s how we’re going to get through this- how we’re _going_ to take them down, once and for all.”

“How can you even say that?” Dan shakes his head, clearly not believing a word. “We say that, every single _fucking_ time, on every mission, every success, every failure- and this always _._ Fucking. Happens. And now it’s-” he hesitates, trying to choke the words out. “Now it’s _Kyle_ they’re going to Tune in, and I don’t know if- if we’ll ever be able to get him out of it.”

Ralph casts his eyes down to the bed, where Dan’s hands are twisting at the strings of his sweatpants in a rush of frenetic energy. His friend would never admit it, but Ralph knows what else Dan means when he says that.

_And I don’t know what I’ll do with myself if we can’t._

* * *

  
  


Two weeks later, they find him.

Three weeks later, they’re infiltrating the East London branch of WWCOMMS, and Kyle and Ed are handcuffed and hidden in a safe house with the rebels for the night to avoid the patrols, now on high alert.

It’s disconcerting, how easy it is for them to get their agents back from the highly-guarded facility. They’ve been thinking about it recently, watching the jumpsuits carefully, seeing the way they seem to turn a blind eye to any rebel they catch sneaking through the pristine white halls.

Charlie and Will eventually came to the grim conclusion that WWCOMMS was no longer just interested in taking rebel agents in and Tuning them for their own nefarious uses. They were _experimenting_ on them, seeing how far they could go with it, and then simply _letting them go_ \- creating chaos that could destroy any dissenting groups from the inside out, without even needing to get their precious white jumpsuits dirty. 

There had been silence in the conference room for a while after that collective realization. Now, every time the jumpsuits let another one of their experiments go, the rebels take no chances.

The next day, Ed is deemed a ‘non-lethal’ hazard and transferred back to the main base. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief for Charlie, who finally starts eating proper meals again after nearly three months of sleepless nights. They don’t mention to him that the man is only mumbling the standard phrases, still fully Tuned in to WWCOMMS, because they don’t have to. Of course Charlie knows.

Ed’s quick return sparks more hope for Kyle’s, but it ebbs slightly when it takes a whole week for the mission crew to confirm that it’s safe for the brainwashed man to return to headquarters. It’s unusual- Ed was gone for nearly a month longer than Kyle- and Dan can’t stop the anxiety from overwhelming him every minute of the days that pass.

Somehow, it only get worse when his best friend is being restrained in the medical wing with the others, and Dan can only watch helplessly from the one-way mirror. 

* * *

“Don’t even mention it.” Dick’s voice is sympathetic, but firm as always. “We need more testing before we attempt it on another one of our own- unless you forget what happened to Murph.”

Oh, Dan remembers all too well what happened to Murph. He’s still around somewhere- last he heard, working intel in their Heathrow base- and he knows why nobody ever mentions the reason he didn’t stay here long after being Tuned out. He shivers at the memory of the man waking up from the last procedure, eyes black as the night sky as he sat up on the operating table. _A fate worse than death_ , one of the doctors had said with a shudder of regret, knowing there was nothing else that could be done.

_Our minds are fragile things_ , Woody had explained to an anxious crowd when Murph’s unexpected “recovery” had been announced. _Whatever they do in there- they change whatever’s inside, focus your every living thought on WWCOMMS. If we get to them early enough, sometimes we can shake them out of it using traditional methods- constant exposure to memories of friends and family, hypnotherapy...sometimes just giving them some time and a safe space for them to recover their own mind can be enough._

But sometimes, if it took too long to get an agent back, that wouldn’t be enough. They’d been doing research for _years_ to find out just how WWCOMMS managed to hijack minds, and it had been promising for a while. So promising that they’d created a list for volunteers- who, if they were captured, and brought back as a white-eyed robot that couldn’t be fixed with normal methods, would give advanced consent to the new procedure.

Murph was the first on the list to be Retuned. The last, too, after what happened.

_His mind was no more fragile than any of ours_ , Woody had added solemnly. _It had just been...Tuned one too many times._

Dan hadn’t volunteered to help in the medical wing again after that.

For the first few days after Murph was Tuned out, the rebel leaders had been sure that a civil war was imminent. There were debates, fights, a stabbing that sent poor Ben to the infirmary for days. Not that it mattered when, a few months later, he ended up being one of the only agents WWCOMMS captured and refused to give back. As far as Charlie and Ed could figure out, he was being made to write propaganda for them. It had nearly brought Ed to self-destruction, but he’d held himself together for Charlie and the rest of their team, until, well-

_It’s a worse fate than being Tuned in the first place,_ people murmured when Murph passed them in the halls. Others argued- _He volunteered, and what else could we do to get him back?_ But even those people were still unable to look the man in the face.

_If we Tune our own people_ , Tord had claimed with a menacing look in his grieving eyes, _we’re no better than them, now, are we?_

Now, Dan stands alone in Dick’s office, hands shaking in anger. “We have to do _something_. Nothing’s _working_.”

“It’s too early to be saying that,” his supervisor says, the lamp in front of him highlighting the dark circles under his eyes. “We’ll keep trying. We’ll get through to him.”

“You can’t promise that,” Dan whispers into the void between them, before turning and throwing open the door to the office. 

It’s been two months since Kyle’s return, only a week since he’s been allowed out of his restraints, and yet it seems like they’re no closer to breaking him from his curse.

* * *

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Charlie’s hand grips Dan’s upper arm gently, unexpectedly reminding both of them of the night this all started, and Dan takes a shaky breath.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s- it’ll be okay.” _Nobody asked you when Ed moved back in_ , he wants to spit back. But he knows that’s not exactly fair. At least Ed was talking in full sentences again, starting to piece together bits of his memory and separate it from the persistent ringing in his head.

“We don’t have to do this today,” Charlie insists, grip tightening as they hear footsteps from down the hall. “If you’re not ready. If you don’t think he is.”

_I’ll never be ready_ , Dan thinks with a tinge of irony. _I haven’t been ready since months before they took him._

He looks up, over Charlie’s shoulder, and there he is. Dan nods stiffly, and Charlie’s arm drops away, and then he’s smiling and welcoming his best friend back home. 

* * *

It doesn’t feel like everything’s back to normal. It doesn’t even feel like a _new_ normal for them, yet. But it’s something.

Dan can come back from his early-morning training to a room that isn’t cold and empty anymore. It’s not the same when Kyle’s eyes don’t immediately light up at the sight of him, instead simply acknowledging him and swiveling back to whatever task he’s doing, but, well. It keeps Dan crawling out from beneath his sheets every day, and that’s all he’s got to cling onto these days.

As per the rules, Dan allocates an hour of time each day to Retuning his best friend. He shows him photos of the two of them, ignoring the blank stare he receives and the swirl of emotion he feels in his stomach when he brushes his finger along the edge of the glossy pictures. 

The therapists in the infirmary have done all this already, of course- gone into the storage room and pulled out the box marked _Kyle Simmons_ , took out all the small things that Kyle himself had confirmed would be the most likely to help the rebels Retune him if he was captured. The box now sits on Dan’s desk, but it isn’t doing any more good than it had before.

So instead, Dan plays him music on the old, beat-up keyboard he keeps under the bed. He leads Kyle into Will’s room and sits him down by the team’s carefully-rebuilt record player, watches as the man’s white eyes fixate on the hypnotizing motion of the vinyl and the sounds that come out of it.

Even Will has to listen to his records or lay a hand on his guitar every few weeks, when the static creeps in again and urges him to sink back into the mind-numbing jumpsuit he’s now wired to be. Woody still lives with him, to keep an eye on it, but eventually he’ll move back in with his girlfriend and it’ll be up to Will to fight it by himself. He’s strong, though, maybe the strongest of all of them. They know he’ll be okay.

Dan tells his superiors he’s making progress with Kyle. It’s not _entirely_ a lie- his eyes have darkened as the brainwashing loses its control over his mind, and he’s started to gain some more self-confidence, doing everyday tasks without being asked.

He hasn’t spoken, though, at least not to Dan. The rest of his team looks taken aback at this, claiming he’d been chatting up all the nurses in the infirmary. Only with the phrases he’d been Tuned to say, of course, but still. He still knew how to speak, then, which was a good sign- he was just...choosing not to.

“Maybe it just means he’s still as stubborn as he used to be,” Will tries to add, as if it’ll help at all. Perhaps it does...just a little. 

Dan tries his best to ignore it, to swallow down the anger that builds whenever Kyle gives him another dull stare and ignores all of the things Dan presents to him. _It’s not him in there._

_Not yet._

* * *

Dan doesn’t tell Kyle about their previous sleeping arrangement when Kyle moves back in, and when his best friend automatically moves towards the bottom bunk Dan shrugs and lets him have it. He can’t help the way his heart sinks- if Kyle doesn’t even remember the place he used to sleep, what does that mean about everything else?- but then he sees how it must look. The sheets to the top bunk are still rumpled, obviously slept in, and the bottom bunk looks like nobody’s ever touched it. 

Whatever the reason, it turns out to be a good decision. Dan’s woken up in the middle of the first night by his friend writhing around on the floor, mumbling to himself in his sleep. Dan’s by his side in an instant, struggling to untangle Kyle’s long limbs from the blankets before one of them whacks into the bed frame or the wooden legs of the desk.

He gets right in Kyle’s face, calling his name quietly until his friend’s eyes fly open and he jerks to a halt, inches away from Dan, chest heaving.

“It’s okay,” Dan whispers- “You’re safe, now. You’re home. I’m here-” and Kyle relaxes, sinking into the floor with a sigh. His confused eyes stay on Dan, swirls of brown battling the white in his irises, and Dan heaves a dry sob and drops his head to his best friend’s chest. “It’ll be okay,” he repeats, though he’s not sure which one of them he’s speaking to anymore.

It’s the first of many nightmares, and Dan’s there through them all. He discovers that this could be Kyle’s brain’s way of Retuning itself- while asleep, his best friend mutters Dan’s name, the name of his old cat, the inside jokes he has with the team. Dan hangs onto every word, repeats them to Kyle in the morning, on the off-chance he remembers anything he says in his unconscious state...nothing. But he can’t deny that it brings his hopes up, just a _bit_.

The team cuts him some slack when they see he’s been sleeping even worse than usual, and Dan finds himself spending upwards of two, or sometimes even three hours trying to get through to Kyle. He chooses nighttime to redouble his efforts, noting with some satisfaction that Kyle’s just as much of a night owl as he used to be.

They sit or lay together in the bottom bunk- a respectable distance apart, of course- and eventually, after Dan starts showing Kyle his old favorite movies on his laptop, they both fall asleep there.

Dan realizes two things the first time he wakes up next to Kyle.

One, he for _sure_ hasn’t shaken the feelings he’s been harboring for his best friend.

And two...Kyle sleeps through the entire night when he’s there.

* * *

It becomes a routine for them, falling asleep next to each other, and Dan hates the feeling that he’s _using_ his best friend in some twisted way, using him for comfort when Kyle doesn’t even seem to care that he’s there.

He tries to rationalize it- he’s trying to be there _for Kyle_ , who can only sleep soundly until the second Dan gets up and goes back to his own bed. For Kyle, who looks almost normal when he’s asleep- dark hair wild and half-smushed against the pillow, eyes shut for so long that Dan can imagine, for just a moment, that this is _his_ Kyle, and he’ll wake up and look at Dan with those warm brown eyes and smile sleepily and tell him all the things he wants to hear, and everything will be okay.

Instead, Dan finds himself shaken awake one night, blinking blearily against the darkness, feeling Kyle hovering over him before his flailing arm finally lands on the bedside table lamp. He sucks in a breath when the light falls on Kyle, tries to ignore the position he might picture they were in if the situation was much, much different than this-

“Kyle,” he chokes out, breathlessly. His best friend is tense, hands pressed into the bed on either side of the bed to stop any part of his body from touching Dan’s. Kyle blinks, and Dan realizes with a second gasp that this part, at least, has finally started to come true.

“Are you…?” He’s afraid of what the question could mean, afraid that the newfound humanity in his friend’s eyes could mean nothing; afraid that if he blinks, it’ll disappear, and they’ll be right back at square one again.

In response, Kyle reaches one hand up from the mattress, lightly brushes a lock of stray hair out of Dan’s face. Dan breathes shallowly into the space between them, feeling like if he does anything, says anything, he could shatter this moment without even trying.

Kyle lets out a long sigh and sinks down, burying his head into the gap between Dan’s head and shoulder. He’s shaking, now, and it takes Dan a minute to realize he’s crying.

“Kyle?” He whispers softly, cautiously, eyes glued to the bed frame above him.

The muffled reply is hoarse and cracked from months of disuse. Kyle grips Dan tighter, his deep voice so quiet and unexpected that Dan freezes for a moment, trying to convince himself he hadn’t imagined it.

“I loved you.” 

**Author's Note:**

> !!!!!!! do you see why i need to write all these sequels now
> 
> many many thanks to [williever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/willIever) for beta reading, and thank you to all the friends who hyped me up enough to get these fics done :') love u guys


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